Today, in an effort to maximize efficiency while minimizing expense, business applications tend to require tighter integration with the other applications due to changing business needs and demands. Consequently, the applications often require business logic changes, tweaks, upgrades and maintenance. Conventionally, these logic changes, tweaks, upgrades and maintenance are performed manually by administrators and are therefore costly to both the organization as well as performance of the overall system. Furthermore, management of the applications is presented with obstacles for example, many of these applications belong to different departments, clients, partners, business units, vendors and/or are deployed in branch-offices, partner networks, DMZ (demilitarized zone), internet, WAN (wide area network), intranet, etc.
In an effort to alleviate issues with such deployments, recent developments employ an AON (application oriented network) based overlay application network that provides significant cost-savings to application infrastructure owners in an enterprise, by allowing these end-points to offload some of the critical application infrastructure and business logic functions to AON nodes. AON involves network devices designed to aid in computer-to-computer application integration.
These recent developments in AON technology were popularized in response to increasing use of Web services based applications, need to connect and carry out transactions between the legacy and new class of XML (extensible markup language) and Web services based applications, XML messaging combined with related standards such as XSLT (extensible stylesheet language transformation), XPATH (XML path) and XQUERY (XML query) to link miscellaneous applications, data sources and other computing assets. In accordance with the AON mechanisms, many of the operations required to mediate between applications, or to monitor their transactions, can be built into network devices that are optimized for the purpose.